Securing funding is a high priority for most Tech City organisations. Today’s guest blog is from James Critchley, CEO of cloud.IQ, who successfully raised £2million to grow his company – below he shares his thoughts on how entrepreneurs can tap into the demand for socially motivated businesses…

In my experience, start-ups are driven by a desire to do something good, but they need capital investment to make it happen.

For some, ‘doing something good’ can simply mean providing employment opportunities and creating wealth for the people that work for them. But for others, it can also mean making a positive difference to society or the environment. And if this is the case, a new range of options can open up to help secure funding. Certainly, this was the case for me, when earlier this year I set up my third business, cloud.IQ. We provide organisations with easy to use marketing apps that help them engage customers more effectively across multiple platforms and devices.

Today, many of us are switching between channels and devices literally every other minute meaning that for a marketer trying to reach us, it can sometimes feel like trying to pin jelly to a wall. This is the issue we fix, by making it easier for organisations to use channels like social media, text and email in an integrated way to talk to customers where, when and how we want to communicate.

Until now, the technology needed to address this issue has been too complex and costly for small and mid sized businesses to adopt. But by offering simple to use cloud-based apps, we’re able to offer multi-channel marketing for as little as £20 a month to all organisations. So far so good.

But the breakthrough moment for me came when I realised that it wasn’t just commercial enterprises that could benefit from our products, but charities too. There are 160,000 registered charities in the UK, generating around £11billion in donations annually, so if they were to engage people more effectively and increase the value of donations by just 5% we could generate an uplift in donations of nearly £550m. When you consider that multi-channel marketing – when done well – typically gives sales uplifts of 20%, the potential becomes compelling.

Incidentally, this thinking was given further weight just last week, when the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) published the results of a study conducted with Bristol University. They found that the amount of donations amongst those of younger aged demographics to charities is tailing off and that we will soon be facing a ‘donation deficit’ as more generous generations die out. Charities need to explore how they can use channels like social media, text and email in an integrated way to talk to young people.

As a result of this thinking, we decided to put helping charities at the core of cloud.IQ’s mission. We offer charities significantly discounted products that are subsidised by our commercial sector sales. We became an ethical business, if not quite a fully fledged social enterprise.

Quite apart from helping to inspire and motivate our staff – and giving me a great deal of personal satisfaction – this move undoubtedly worked in our favour when we set out to raise funds to grow the business. We were able to attract the interest of Bridges Ventures, a sustainable investment company, previously chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen, which backs entrepreneurs that want to make a difference to society or the environment. We were fortunate enough to raise £2million of funding from the Bridges Sustainable Growth Fund – money that will help us grow the commercial side of cloud.IQ and in doing so directly benefit the charity sector.

So, for other entrepreneurs seeking investment, it is certainly worthwhile exploring if your product or service can be adapted in a way that will directly benefit society. Of course, this can’t be an exercise in window dressing – you have to be passionate about the cause you want to support, as we are, and the fundamentals of having a viable commercial product remain – investors will always want to see a financial as well as a societal return.

But it may just open some new doors for you – Bridges is just one of a growing number of investors looking to back companies that do good as well as turn a profit. And if you’re anything like me, you might just feel even better about what you’re doing too.

cloud.IQ is a provider of cloud based integrated marketing applications. They are backed by Bridges Ventures, a private investment firm and have offices in London and Sydney.